LeWeb'09: Facebook, Facebook Connect, Identity (Ethan Beard) [en]

Mark’s initial idea: give people a better way to connect. Basic information. 5 years ago.

Huge growth now. The core activity on the site hasn’t changed, but now the user base has changed. 70% of the users come from outside the USA.

Not just connections between people, but between people, objects, ideas, places. Building an accurate representation of one’s identity. I’m easily identified as/by a series of connections.

Facebook connect: opening up for others to build upon. Traveling together. Facebook didn’t get this growth by going alone. Taking the connectivity of Facebook outside the platform.

Facebook aspires to be a technology that people use to connect to what they care about wherever they are.

Tool for building applications inside Facebook => connecting outside Facebook, with Facebook Connect. Fanbox: very successful. People are looking for ways to connect to brands and companies they care about not just on Facebook.

Didn’t imagine that gaming would be such a success. Social gaming. Hugely successful companies. And now traditional gaming companies like Sony etc are jumping in.

Examples:

The Huffington Post. Add the network to reading news. What are my friends reading? Using Facebook Connect makes it easy for users to comment and publish back into Facebook stuff they find. Since they added Facebook Connect to Huff Post, 500% FB referrals, 50% comments, 50% user growth *(steph-note: other factors might factor in to explain growth… can’t give 100% credit to Facebook Connect for that, though I’m sure it has an influence.)*

Bejeweled2 on Facebook. But you shouldn’t be limited to playing on Facebook. With Connect, can play elsewhere but it remains social.

Connect is the glue that ties together your experiences, whatever the device you are using. Ubiquituous. *(spelling?)*

The web is about people and you experience it through the lens of your friends. The graph is the foundation of the social web. *(steph-note: reminds me I have to write a post about the blogosphere as a social network — this stuff is not new)*